The recent release of IE7 has gotten me to thinking. (Always a dangerous sign.)

Let's suppose you could set aside the political BS and actually talk to the documentation team for Internet Explorer's SDK, the folks that document IE's support for HTML, CSS, and other browser idiosyncracies. Let's say you could tell them what you didn't like about the existing documentation and could tell them what would make the documentation "pop."

Mind you, this isn't a request to bash IE; that's been done quite effectively elsewhere. Instead, it's a serious attempt to solicit feedback from a community that has typically not been consulted with respect to this documentation set.

Nor is it a request for feature support in the next release of IE. Yes, we all know it would be sweet if IE would support ACID2; however, today it doesn't and this isn't that sort of thread. This is strictly a focus on the developer documentation. What's confusing, what's missing, what would make that material a useful resource for you?

(And before you bash me for being off-topic, this does affect those of us using perl to write Web 1.0-style CGI scripts. There is an audience that I feel has been left out of the discussion and wonder what, if granted the opportunity, what feedback that community would provide.)

Maybe it's me but I think most (even W3C) HTML/CSS/Java...err..ECMAscript documentation sucks. It's very difficult to search and oh brother is it dryer than white toast that's been sitting on the counter for a few days. Recently I've been turned on to firefox's html validator. I think that's the direction you need to go ... show me documentation when I need it, where I need it and only about what I need -- I really don't want to see your *marketing pop* when all I need to know is if a tag or attribute is deprecated for a particular doctype. But hey ... that's just me.

When putting a smiley right before a closing parenthesis, do you:

Use two parentheses: (Like this: :) )
Use one parenthesis: (Like this: :)
Reverse direction of the smiley: (Like this: (: )
Use angle/square brackets instead of parentheses
Use C-style commenting to set the smiley off from the closing parenthesis
Make the smiley a dunce: (:>
I disapprove of emoticons
Other